(no subject)

[sebastienne]

From the land of "stating the fucking obvious" to "jesus christ WHAT?!" in just one easy click -

from a reading list I'm annotating at work:

"Does malnutrition affect fecundity?"

All very well, you may say.. yet more pointless research. What's new in that?

I started reading anyway, just to be sure.. and came across the sentiment, "maybe if we stop feeding women in the third world, we can control the population problem".

When has this ever been an OK thing to suggest? Seriously? Even in the 1980s? I know they had Thatcher and Reagan, but seriously?

Comments

[castophrenia.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's pretty impressive. You almost have to admire their boldfacedness.

Population control being defined as a 'women's problem' goes way back, as far as I can tell- I think Malthus was very much in fashion in the 80s?

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Malthusian collapse was bigger in the seventies, I think - people suddenly panicked by the oil crisis and flailing around for similar things to worry about. (Hence why so many 1970s predictions of the future seem so silly nowadays, more so than most old predictions - Stand on Zanzibar. I mean, really)

[googles] The author is still around, the Vice President of the "Population Council"... ah, that explains it, or at least gives a bit of context. He was working there when he wrote the paper, and indeed had done pretty much since he took his doctorate, so it seems likely he'd approach any issue with a view to its effects on the "population problem".

(The Population Council is now fairly sane - big on third-world contraception - but historically had a background in the eugenic movement. Take that how you will.)

[lizziwig.livejournal.com]

Ah, Stand on Zanzibar. There's a few days of my life I'll never get back.

Malthusian theory was also pretty big in theories of demographic collapse in England before the Black Death, despite all the evidence showing that positive and preventitive checks just weren't working, and that it was bacteria and not too much population that made everyone die. there's plenty of weird stuff in that as well, my personal favourite being the guy who spent several pages describing how horrible it was for the poor landlords who had to suffer the ignobility of freeing their serfs afterwards, with no mention of the fact that the end of centuries of slavery might, in fact, be A Good Thing.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

You have to admire Brunner for his attempt to not just take one piddling trend and extrapolate it, but to take them all and extrapolate. (Population boom, sure; energy crisis, sure; crime surge, everyone else did... but running the rate of social change of the 60s-70s sexual revolution for another three decades? Not the most rational projection.)

Malthusianism is just so damned seductive; it's neat and simple and sounds eminently obvious. Using it to explain things which obviously couldn't be attributable to it even were it right (eg the plague, but if you wait around long enough someone'll blame the K-T impactor on it, too) is thus rather enticing for the slapdash theorist.

As to the horribleness for the landlords, yeah. It's a perfect example of that wonderful Whiggish (is that the word?) view of history, a nice orderly progression towards Constitutional Democracy And So Forth, which kept getting spoiled and knocked out of sync by revolutions and the wrong sort of wars and Other Such Things Done By People Who Didn't Know Any Better. (see, eg, the Peasant's Revolt or the English Civil War). "Oh no! The peasants are taking advantage of this break in the logical sequence of history to try and mess things up further! Get back to where you were, we have Chapter Seven of English Constitutional History next, and you don't get to end serfdom until Chapter Twelve!"

[lizziwig.livejournal.com]

No book has ever confused me more. It's certainly interesting, though I think life is too short to read it again and try to actually get it.

The problem with Malthusianism and most historical systems is that they just reduce people to economic units who will inevitably respond to things like available farmland by having lots of kids and will then conveniently die when there isn't enough, in a nice enclosed system where nothing is exogenous or weird or unpredictable, and the downright weirdness of the late fourteenth century can in no way be attributed to the massive psychological shock of losing the majority of your friends and neighbours, or downright personal contrariness; it all has to be about non-personal economic forces and feudal reactions, which do exist and make slapdash tutorial essays nice and structured, but are also pretty crap history. Which is why I usually eat up my word counts laying into various -isms rather than actually answering the question set.

As to the K-T impactor, I now have the urge to macro 'Gay marriage killed the peasantry', to go with my lolLollards. I need a life.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Heh. The counterpart to the Great Man theory of history being, therefore, the Reasonable Man theory of history - such a creature never existed, but it makes establishing the rules to explain what happened so much easier... (hey, it works for lawyers)

The last time I wrote a history essay was about eleven or twelve years ago. I faintly miss it.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

The field of demographics has a long and illustrious history of "oh no, the darkies are outbreeding us!" sentiments.

[antoniabaker.livejournal.com]

oooh this is one of myfavourite topics actually did my disertation on this, will read article with proper concentration but off the top of my head never in all my knowledge or readings has increasing malnutrition been put forward as a way of combating population expolosions. Incidnelty there are terrible drawbacks possible due to sudden increases in birthrates and population growths (and there are very important differences between the two)including a fall in quality of life and poverty traps, and while Malthus has been rejected time and again population control is sometimes a very real and nesecary problem, the obvious example being China in the 1960s where population control methods where ineffective, increases in population overtook increases in food production and 60 million+ people died from famine caused by one year's bad harvest.

[janetmweiss.livejournal.com]

I can't see the article. Is this suggested legitimately in the article or is it a stupid person's/troll's comment on it or...?

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

first page: "A strong link between nutrition and fecundity would have important implications, especially for food aid programs for the developing world. If improving nutrition in those countries increased their birthrates, it would exacerbate an already serious population growth problem". Can upload pdf if you want to check the whole thing out...

[janetmweiss.livejournal.com]

Nah, it's ok. I'll probably be able to see it when I'm on a campus computer tomorrow.

[vass]

"maybe if we stop feeding women in the third world, we can control the population problem".

Oh holy fuck. :'( Some people.